Outside the Scope: Transitions and Conjunctions
In which I warn writers against the most seductive and dangerous part of speech
I once heard someone say that Beethoven’s genius was revealed in how he transitioned from one theme to another.1 On first reaction, it’s an odd claim to make, like saying that the best part of a restaurant was the elegance with which the wait staff took the finished plates of one course away from you and replaced them with the full plates of the next. Shouldn’t the pleasure and beauty of music come from the music itself rather than the getting from one section to the other?
I have not immersed myself deeply enough in the structure of Beethoven’s music to judge just how essential transitions are in his work. I bring up the anecdote to explain the importance of transitions to writing. In my experience, it’s a very important skill that is almost never taught. Many guides to writing well prefer to spend their time urging you to eliminate adjectives and adverbs. That’s very bad advice. Want to know which part of speech you should really try to avoid? Conjunctions.
Yes, get rid of conjunctions.2 This is good advice because it is impossible to realize: in the above paragraph I used zero conjunctions, but I’ve just typed my second conjunction in one sentence, and (third conjunction) already I feel like I can breathe again. But the very attempt to do the impossible and get rid of conjunctions can inspire new and marvelous combinations of words.
In reading, what I tend to notice the most is not the individual sentences but the friction between one sentence and another. Generally, good prose requires that the gap between one sentence and another not be so big that it becomes jarring or veeres into a non-sequitur, but not be so small that stepping from one idea to the next becomes routine, monotonous, lacking in novelty.
And, but, for, so, however, nevertheless, thus, while, when, although - these are all familiar ways of making sentence transitions routine and readers bored. Sometimes you can improve a sentence just by eliminating its conjunctions - see how much better this one works when it doesn’t begin with “And”?
Other times, getting rid of conjunctions requires you to re-think your sentences entirely. It spurs you to experiment with new structures and new styles. It leads you to reconsider every clause, every phrase, every word, and in so doing turn the flow of your prose from a steady trickle to a fierce, swerving, exciting river current. At its best, it transforms you from an engineer of prose to an architect of language.
Unfortunately, reducing conjunctions alone is not enough to create quality prose. There is always the risk, one endemic to undergraduate literary magazines, of abusing certain kinds of punctuation; semicolons become a lazy way for one idea to follow another — em-dashes multiply uncontrollably (let’s not get started on parenthetical asides).
Having said that, let me turn to the literary pedigree I can muster to support my invective against conjunctions and the obvious, at-hand transitions that go alongside them. In Pride and Prejudice, the learning, education, and wit of Mr. Bennett are revealed through his use of sharp, pointed sentences, ones that have no need to be burdened by unnecessary conjunctions: “You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. They are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with consideration these twenty years at least.”
William Hazlitt, a contemporary of Jane Austen, was a master of this art. Look at the beginning of the second paragraph of his essay "On the Pleasure of Hating":
Nature seems (the more we look into it) made up of antipathies: without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action. Life would turn to a stagnant pool, were it not ruffled by the jarring interests, the unruly passions, of men. The white streak in our own fortunes is brightened (or just rendered visible) by making all around it as dark as possible; so the rainbow paints its form upon the cloud. Is it pride? Is it envy? Is it the force of contrast? Is it weakness or malice?
These 94 words in seven sentences contain four conjunctions, three of which are coordinating conjunctions which combine two nouns or adjectives. You can almost see the beauty of its construction just by looking at its punctuation. His style is very dense, learned, and considered, but his skill with transitions makes it race along with a rapidity many thriller writers fail at.
Hazlitt’s style was something of a reaction against the long, snarly sentences of the age of Samuel Johnson. See the opening of his 18th essay for The Rambler:
There is no observation more frequently made by such as employ themselves in the surveying of the conduct of mankind, than that marriage, though the dictate of nature, and the institution of providence, is yet very often the cause of misery, and that those who enter into that state can seldom forbear to express their repentance, and their envy of those whom either chance or caution has withheld it.
You may chuckle at the three ands which prolong this sentence to our modern ears, but Samuel Johson was also a great writer, and his ability to write pristine sentences with several conjunctions was a part of his greatness. Perhaps my advice is not as universally applicable as I asserted earlier. I was inspired in my advice by an essay from five years ago by Christian Lorentzen: “Could We Just Lose the Adverb (Already)?” Though at the outset of the essay he declares, “I hate adverbs,” his concluding thoughts are more mixed than his title and introduction indicate:
At present, obviously, nevertheless, no one is allowed to write like Stein aside from certified experimental poets. Stein and the other modernists broke the language, and they broke the adverb’s back. You can see this by comparing her pupil Hemingway to Henry James. What’s been dispensed with are those sentence adverbs like the trio that begin this paragraph. Hemingway likes nothing better than to begin a sentence with “He.” The adverbs he favors are “really” and “very,” sometimes in combination, because they have the ring of simple speech. But in the work of his mid-20th-century disciples — Ralph Ellison, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer at his sparest in The Executioner’s Song — verbs and adjectives tend to fly solo. The era’s great exception is Nabokov, who knew how to wring comedy from adverbs in the manner of Melville or Poe. Lolita teems with adverbs. They satisfied Nabokov’s thirst for neologism — “apostately,” for instance. To steal a line from Humbert Humbert, you have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, to love adverbs.
Lorentzen is clearly skilled enough in minimizing conjunctions to produce invigorating journalism. But his final sentence makes me wonder if artists and madmen love conjunctions as well. Look through an edition of Don Quixote in its original Spanish and see how many times Cervantes uses “y” (some translators break his extremely long sentences up into smaller ones). I would predict that Thomas Bernhard is similarly profligate in his use of “und.”
These are of course authors operating in the particularities of an entirely different language, but their work has been an influence on English-language novelists. It would be a useful task to study a correlation between conjunctions and prose deemed experimental in English-language novels… but that is a subject for another essay.
Photo by Florian Klauer on Unsplash
I believe I got this half-remembered idea from a video of Esa-Pekka Salonen discussing his Beethoven cycle with the Philharmonia Orchestra of London:
For the purposes of this essay, I am including conjunctive adverbs in my anti-conjunction stance. I am sure that any practitioner of the high school composition will shudder at the thought of the malignant howevers they scattered about their efforts.